The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus

by Emma Knight

If you took the monsters’ point of view, everything they did made perfect sense. The trick was learning to think like a monster. —Sy Montgomery, The Soul of an Octopus

Rare is the mother who forgets the Goldfish crackers and is cannibalized in her minivan. More common is the one who devours herself.

I am thirty-one years old. From here I can see my own mother, far better than before.

As nights smudge into looping days, I return to that year. I remember who we were, and what we thought we knew. I turn it over in my mind deciding what to let sink, and what to preserve for a future that I can hardly presume to imagine, because it will be yours.

Jo’s twin brother was the first to join them. Fergus Scarlett Moore was tall and almost comically regal in his bearing, with neatly combed blond hair and an air of studied melancholy that reminded Pen of photos of F. Scott Fitzgerald.

He must have thought she was too young to remember. But children remember everything. It’s adults who forget.

Being in nature shrank her self-consciousness into irrelevance so she forgot all about it.

Pen had been trained to breathe less air than everyone else, whereas Alice had never once in her life felt the need to apologize for taking up space.

She could see how easy it would be to relive her parents’ lives without quite choosing to, the way a toboggan finds its way into the pre-compressed path of whoever went before. She wanted to better understand the route they had taken, so she didn’t fall into it by mistake.

She had the impression, as they ran through the train station parking lot and into the shelter of the big car, that Christina did not need to look outside of herself very often for proof that she was living in the right way. But she displayed none of the smug self-satisfaction that one might expect to accompany this apparent peace of mind.

“The mother who insists on keeping that inner self of hers alive is monstrous. No one blinks when a father continues devoting himself to whatever it is he most wants to accomplish in this world. But a wife and mother who has priorities of her own and refuses to put them last? Hers becomes a life of conflict, between who she is and what is expected of her. Society deems her selfish and unnatural. If she lets herself believe it, she’s doomed, and so are her children.”

You spent my entire childhood preaching honesty while—And then you came here, and you still didn’t have the guts to tell me. You let me feel crazy instead.

Getting to choose for oneself is a gift so vanishingly rare that one must never squander it.”